On 06/28/2014 04:00 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> Unfortunately, no other application can play sound now, until I shut LMMS.
>
> And if I start LMMS again while any other application that produces
> sound is running, then LMMS comes up with "dummy" as the output device
> again.
>
> So, much like using JACK was: this is a "solution" that completely
> fails to play nice with anything else. I do have cause to listen to
> things while doing things in LMMS ...

Well, that's unfortunate. But yes: if you use the soundcard directly
from LMMS, then no other application can use it. This is expected
behaviour.

If you have two soundcards, you can set it so that LMMS uses one and PA
uses another, then you can use both at the same time. For serious audio
work you should have a dedicated soundcard/interface anyway...

> Is there a solution such that LMMS will actually play well with other things?

Yes. That involves taking a long hard look at the LMMS Jack backend and
fixing the bugs in it.

> Linux sound has always been a utter, utter disaster. Every now and
> then someone writes a new Linux sound architecture that solves some of
> the previous problems and introduces new ones. Pulse is just the
> latest attempt.

There's nothing wrong with PA, it's just not designed for audio
production. Jack is, and plays well together with PA (you can use Jack
as a backend for PA, or even set it to use ALSA normally and use Jack
whenever Jack is running).

Linux audio has had problems in the past but calling it a "disaster" is
way off the mark. Also saying that we get a "new architecture now and
then" that attempts to solve previous problems is incorrect as well.

Linux audio architecture today consists of three pieces: ALSA, PA and Jack.

ALSA is the low-level kernel implementation that provides support for
all hardware devices. The hardware support there is as good or bad as
all other hardware support on Linux - it varies. But that's not any kind
of fundamental problem in Linux audio per se - it's just a problem of
hardware vendors not caring about Linux, and as with any other hardware,
it's up to the user to select hardware that is known to work well under
Linux.

Both PA and Jack are higher-level architectures which use ALSA primarily
as a backend. Their job is not to "replace" ALSA - they couldn't,
because they can't work without a low-level backend that deals with the
hardware directly. The job of ALSA is to abstract away the hardware so
that other applications can use it. PA and Jack both have different
purposes and fulfill different functions. None of them are meant as any
kind of attempt at replacing each other.

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